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Macs Staking Out Turf As Standard Business PCs

nfoworld’s Galen Gruman says that over the past year he’s witnessed a sea change in Macs’ acceptance in business, with MacBook Airs having became senior execs’ preferred status-symbol PCs for the past couple years ago, and research firm Gartner predicting that IT will consider Macs to be as valid as Windows PCs next year, withtools to enable that already coming.

Gruman cites Acronis’s enterprises backup tool and its newfound support this week for OS X as an example, with its Time Machine backups, letting IT integrate OS X’s native (and free) backups into an enterprisewide workflow, noting that now Macs can be backed up at enterprise scale. Others are mobile management vendors AirWatch and MobileIron having been able to extend their mobile device management (MDM) tools to Macs, enabling IT departments to manage everything from app permissions to encryption and password requirements using the tools they already have for iPhones and other mobile devices, and Mac management plug-ins for Microsoft’s System Center PC management server from JAMF and Dell (Quest), as well as multipatform management tools from Centrify, Dell (Kace), LANDesk, and Symantec (Altiris).